Of late, I've noticed an increasing number of players who seem confused by the fact that vampires can shapechange into wolves. When writing reviews they make comments like "you can even transform into a wolf when you are a vampire (for some reason)", and on a couple of occasions I've even been asked if it was a bug!

Yes, werewolves can also turn into wolves - but they're not the only ones! Mythology is rife with countless variations of vampire, many of which have far less obvious shapechanging powers (spiders, scorpions, cats, ravens, orbs of light, balls of dust, etc). But in fiction, when a vampire possesses any shapechanging powers at all, the most common forms I've seen are wolf, bat and mist. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula was able to assume those three forms, and they're also the typical vampire forms I've seen in most roleplaying games (such as Vampire the Masquerade, D&D, etc).

GodWars muds have included shapechanging for over a decade, yet it's only recently that I've started encountering people who are confused about vampires transforming into wolves. Perhaps it's because the feature is more prominent in my current mud, or maybe the newer generation of mudders aren't familiar with the same sort of books I read for inspiration.

I know there are a lot of other muds out there with vampires - have any other mud admin encountered this sort of response from their players? Or perhaps something similar with other mythology-inspired creatures?

I even remember reading something where a vampire turns
not just into "a bat", but a cloud of bats.

What you might be running into is confusion caused by a
recent film franchise. I forget the name, but there's a couple
of movies out now with the premise of there being a "war"
between vampires and werewolves.

If your first exposure to vampire mythology is this business of
there being antagonism toward werewolves, then seeing
vampires morph into wolves on a mud might seem jarring and
"wrong".

-Crat

Underworld

There are many variations on the vampire theme. I'm not sure which come from legend and which from Hollywood.

For example, in the Bram Stoker novel that launched the character Dracula, it is clear that sunlight neither kills, damages, or even hurts Dracula. It only limits his powers.

Yet, just about every movie, game, etc. seems to presume otherwise.

Yes, Protean level 4 - that's the White Wolf game I mentioned earlier.

Interestingly, in the new White Wolf Vampire game (Requiem) that animosity seems to have been mostly removed.